by Kōji Suzuki
But the plastic Petri dish in which his father’s cells were being cultured was in its usual place, and he had no trouble finding it.
So this is what immortality looks like, he thought. It mystified him, as it always did.
His father’s liver had been removed—having changed from its normal reddish-pink to a mottled hue covered with what looked like white powder—and was now sealed in a glass jar, preserved in formaldehyde, in another cabinet, where it had been stored for three years now. Sometimes it seemed to squirm or writhe, but maybe that was a trick of the light.
The liver was dead, of course, pickled in formaldehyde. Whereas the cancer cells in the Petri dish were alive.
The dish contained cells grown from Kaoru’s father’s cancer cells, cultured in a medium with a blood serum concentration of less than one percent.
With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won’t multiply beyond a single layer no matter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.
Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a flat, orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional, disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.
Immortality.
Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immortality, the object of man’s deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men.
As if to demonstrate their three-dimensional nature, his father’s cancer cells had bubbled up into a spheroid. Every time Kaoru looked they had taken on a different shape. Originally, these had their source in normal cells in his father’s liver, but now it might be more appropriate to see them as an independent life form. Even as their erstwhile host faced his crisis, these cells greedily enjoyed eternal life.
Kaoru set this dish full of concentrated contradiction into the phase contrast microscope. Its magnification only went up to x200, but it allowed easy color imaging. He could only use the scanning electron microscope when he had time to spare.
The cancer cells, these life forms which had gone beyond any moderating influence, presented a peculiar sight. Perhaps there was something actually, objectively grotesque about their appearance, or perhaps they only looked grotesque to him because of his preconceptions about them as usurpers of human life.
Kaoru struggled to abandon this bias, his hatred of the agent of his father’s suffering, as he observed the sample.
Raising the magnification, he could see that the cells were clumping together. The long, spindly, translucent cells grew as a thicket, stained a thin green. This wasn’t their natural color; the microscope had a green filter attached.
Normal cells would have been evenly distributed in a flat, orderly fashion, with no one part sticking out, but these cancer cells revealed, here and there, a thicker green shadow.
He could see them clearly: a multitude of points, bubbling up roundly, shining. These were cells in the process of dividing.
Kaoru changed the dish under the microscope several times, comparing the cancer cells to normal cells. The surface difference was readily apparent: the cancer cells displayed a chaotic filthiness.
But the surface of the cells was all he could examine: an optical microscope wasn’t powerful enough to show him their nuclei or DNA.
Still, Kaoru gazed on untiring. His heart was heavy with the knowledge that he was wasting his time: just what was he going to learn looking at them from the outside? Still, even as he cursed himself for doing so, he examined the external part of each and every one of them.
The cells all looked alike on the surface. Thousands of identical faces, all in a row.
Identical faces.
Kaoru raised his face from the microscope.
Totally out of the blue, he had compared the cells to human faces. But that was what they looked like: the same face thousands of times over, gathering and sticking together in a clump until they formed a mottled mass.
Kaoru had to look away for a while.
That image came to me intuitively. Was it for a reason?
That was the first question to consider. His father had taught him to pay attention to his intuition.
It often happened that Kaoru would be reading a book or walking down the street and suddenly a completely unrelated scene would present itself to his mind’s eye. Usually he didn’t inquire into the reason. Say he was walking down the street and saw a movie star on a poster: he might suddenly remember an acquaintance who resembled the movie star. If he didn’t register having seen the poster, which was entirely possible, it would seem as if the image of his acquaintance had come to him out of nowhere.
If it was a kind of synchronicity, then Kaoru wanted to analyze it to find out what had synched up with what. He’d been looking at cancer cells under x200 magnification, and something had been triggered so that the cells looked to him like human faces. Now: did that mean something?
Pondering it brought no answer, so Kaoru returned his gaze to the microscope. There had to be something which had elicited the comparison in his imagination. He saw narrow cells piled up in three dimensions. Little glowing globes. Kaoru muttered the same thing as before.
No doubt about it, they all have the same face.
Not only that, but it was clearly not a man’s face, not to his imagination. If he had to choose he’d say it was somehow feminine. An egg-shaped, regular face, with smooth, even slippery, skin.
This was weird. In all the times he’d looked at cells through the phase contrast microscope, he’d never thought they looked like human faces.
6
Kaoru was in a hospital room face-to-face with Ryoji, but his mind was on the sounds coming from the bathroom. Reiko had been in there for some time, with the water running. She wasn’t showering; maybe she was washing underwear. While tutoring Ryoji he’d seen Reiko hurriedly gathering up underwear that had been hung up to dry in the room.
Distractedly, Kaoru set about answering Ryoji’s questions about his father’s condition.
He gave him a brief rundown, but Ryoji’s body language said he wanted to hear more. Maybe he wanted to sketch in the future of his own illness based on what he could learn of Kaoru’s father’s.
Kaoru stopped the conversation before Ryoji could start to guess that the cancer had spread to his father’s lungs. Partly he hesitated because he thought the knowledge might have a negative influence on Ryoji, but partly he simply didn’t want to say it out loud.
When the cancer had become heavy on his lungs, Hideyuki’s face had started to betray weakness; he’d started to talk about what would happen after he was gone—to talk about entrusting Kaoru with his mother’s care.
Look after Machi, okay?
At the sight of this weakness, Kaoru was seized with a desire to deliver the full force of his anger upon his father. And just how am I supposed to comfort Mom after you die, he wanted to say. Quit laying these impossible tasks on me!
Now as he sat talking about his father’s condition with Ryoji, also lying flat in a hospital bed, his father’s image came to him, and he had a hard time speaking. Not noticing that Kaoru had fallen silent, and insensitive to the reason why, Ryoji produced a forced-sounding laugh.
“Now that I think about it, Kaoru, I talked to your father once.”
They’d both been in and out of the hospital with the same illness. No matter how big the hospital, it wasn’t unlikely that they’d come into contact.
“Really?”
“He’s the tall guy in 7B, right?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s pretty strong.
He’s always frisky, slapping the nurses’ butts and stuff like that.”
That was Hideyuki alright. He’d achieved a certain notoriety among the patients for the cheerful way in which he battled his illness, never seeming to lose heart. They said that seeing him act so cheerful, so unafraid of death, made it possible for them to hang on to the hope necessary to gamble on long odds. He’d lost his stomach, his large intestine, and his liver, and now it looked like the cancer had spread to his lungs: his time, it appeared, had come. But regardless, in front of other people he put on a display of high spirits he couldn’t possibly feel. The only exception was when he was alone with Kaoru: then he allowed his weak side to show …
“What about your Mom, Kaoru? How’s she doing?” Ryoji asked, without much evident concern.
Reiko came out of the bathroom, spread the laundry out on the extra bed, and then disappeared back into the bathroom.
Kaoru followed her with his eyes, but the expected sound of running water never came. It seemed that Reiko just didn’t want to be there. Maybe because the topic of Kaoru’s mother had come up.
The Metastatic Human Cancer Virus can also be spread through contact with lymphocytes, the attending physician had said. Kaoru’s first fears had been for his mother. He imagined they’d ceased sexual relations as soon as they’d been made aware of the risk, but there was a good chance she’d already contracted it by that point. Recently, Kaoru had finally been able to prevail on his mother to have her blood tested.
The results were positive. She had yet to manifest any symptoms, but it was a fact that the MHC virus had already attached itself to her DNA. In other words, the retrovirus’s base sequence had been incorporated into the chromosomes in her cells.
At the moment, the process was paused at that step, but at any time her cells might begin to turn cancerous. In fact, there was every chance that it had already begun, and it just wasn’t yet apparent on the surface.
The mechanism that determined when and how the provirus attached to the chromosomes would turn the cell cancerous was not yet understood, so the disease’s progress from this point could not be predicted with any accuracy. But if it moved on to the next step, then his mother’s cells would start producing new copies of the MHC virus.
Even if I get sick, I don’t want to have surgery, she’d proclaimed, as soon as she’d heard the results. Since there was no way to head off metastasis, surgery was doomed from the start. All it could do was slow the progress of the disease, not cure it. After watching her husband suffer, she had a strong aversion to seeing her own body carved away piece by piece.
But what bothered Kaoru most was seeing his mother stray into mysticism, thinking that if modern medicine couldn’t cure her, she’d try to find her own miracle elsewhere. The person she really wanted to save was not herself, although she knew she’d someday come down with cancer, but her husband, in the last stages of his.
With a passion that wouldn’t blink at selling her soul to the devil, she started reading old writings on North American Indians. Her desk was stacked high with primary sources sent from who knew where.
The mythical world holds the key to a cure for cancer, she insisted, almost deliriously.
Again from the bathroom came the purposeful sound of running water. Ryoji reacted by glancing toward the bathroom.
“My mother’s a carrier,” said Kaoru in a low voice.
“Oh. So are you …?”
Ryoji asked his question with no emotion whatsoever, and Kaoru slowly shook his head. He’d had his blood tested two months ago, and the results had come back negative.
Hearing this, Ryoji actually laughed. Not necessarily out of relief that Kaoru was uninfected, though. Rather, it was a scornful, even pitying cackle. Kaoru glared at him.
“What’s so funny about that?”
“I just feel sorry for you.”
“For me?” Kaoru pointed at himself, and Ryoji nodded his head twice.
“Yeah. You’re strong and healthy, so you’re probably going to live a long time. Just thinking about it …”
Under his motorcycle-loving father’s influence, Kaoru had taken up motocross, and under Hideyuki’s tutelage he’d improved his showing with every race he’d entered. He’d grown up muscular and fit in a way that nobody could have predicted from a childhood spent on a computer from morning to night. Kaoru’s muscles were visible even through his T-shirt, and yet this scrawny kid was pitying him. To Kaoru it sounded like he was laughing at something Kaoru had inherited from his father, and he fought back vigorously.
“Living’s not as bad a thing as you seem to think it is.”
Part of him could understand Ryoji’s feelings, of course. Kaoru didn’t know when or how he’d been infected, but here he was at age twelve—between surgery, chemotherapy, and repeated hospitalizations, his life had been nothing but an endless round of suffering. Kaoru could see why he’d want to generalize from his experience and believe that everybody must be feeling the same way.
“Yeah, but everybody dies.” Ryoji turned his hollow gaze toward the ceiling. Kaoru no longer felt like arguing with him.
Death filled everything, everywhere. There in front of him was that bald little head. It was a solemn fact.
Nobody who hasn’t experienced it can understand the misery of chemotherapy. Overcome with violent nausea, you lose your appetite, and anything you do manage to eat, you bring up again soon enough; you can’t get any sleep. That was Ryoji’s life, and that was how his life was going to end in the not-too-distant future. Kaoru knew it. What could he possibly say in the face of that?
Kaoru felt tired. Not physical fatigue. It was like his heart was blocked and screaming. He wanted to soar; he wanted to laugh, freely and from the heart. He wanted to spend time in close bodily contact with another human being.
“I never wanted to be born in the first place,” Ryoji said, ignoring Kaoru’s unresponsiveness. At that very moment, Reiko stepped out of the bathroom and into the reverberations of Ryoji’s statement. Without the slightest change in her expression she crossed the room and went out into the hall.
Why did you have me? Perhaps she left because she couldn’t bear her son’s accusations, or perhaps she simply had an errand to run. There was no way of telling.
But Kaoru had been paying attention to her movements. And now two questions raised their heads. First of all, was Reiko infected with the MHC virus? And, second, by what route did Ryoji become infected with it? These were questions Kaoru couldn’t come right out and ask, as they touched on private family matters.
“Well, I think I’ll be on my way now.” He couldn’t be by Ryoji’s side any longer. Plus, he wanted to follow Reiko.
Kaoru left the boy’s bed and opened the door to the hallway. He wanted to come into closer contact with Reiko, both bodily and with what was inside her. Maybe his interest in her amounted to a kind of love; he couldn’t tell. He felt that she was urging him out of the cramped hospital room and into the world outside.
Compelled by this stimulus, Kaoru wandered the long corridors of the hospital, looking for Reiko.
7
He had an idea where she was, or at least he thought he did.
My only peace these days comes from going to the very highest point in the hospital and looking out over the city.
A few evenings before, Kaoru had seen her standing outside the restaurant on the top floor of the hospital, nose pressed against a window, and he’d asked her what she was doing. She’d explained her actions with those words.
The sun would be setting soon, silhouetting the skyscrapers in this subcenter of the city, bringing them into beautiful relief. Kaoru knew that this was her favorite time of day for gazing at the city.
He got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor, and when he stepped into the hallway and looked left he could see a woman standing there, leaning against a pillar. Kaoru approached her without speaking, until they were standing side by side.
The setting sun streaked Reiko’s
face with crimson. Her cheeks glowed seductively as they reflected the sky’s shifting hues.
She knew as soon as he came up to her; she could see his reflection in the glass. She addressed his reflection with a faint smile.
“I’m sorry.”
Kaoru couldn’t figure out what she was apologizing for. Maybe she was recognizing his skill in tutoring her difficult-to-deal-with son, but in that case a thank-you would have been more appropriate. Kaoru was embarrassed for a response.
He decided not to ask why she’d apologized. “You really like high places, don’t you?”
“I do. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived my whole life hugging the ground.”
Did she mean she’d always lived in one-story houses? If so, it was a stark contrast to Kaoru’s own living environment. He still lived with his mother in their apartment tower overlooking Tokyo Bay.
Reiko changed the subject in an effort to dispel the oppressive atmosphere; in an enthusiastic voice she started talking about dreams. She started right in, like a shot, with what she wanted to do first when her son had recovered from his illness. The precondition itself—her son recovering—being utterly impossible, she was free to dream whatever unrealistic dreams she felt like. Among the more realistic ideas she mentioned was taking a trip overseas.
So when she changed tack and asked Kaoru, “What’s your dream?” he was able without hesitation to come up with the family trip to the North American desert that they’d planned ten years ago.
Kaoru gave Reiko a brief account of what they’d talked about that late night ten years ago—the relationship between gravity and life, the mysteries of life itself, and how those led to the possible existence of longevity zones.
He then explained in simple terms how his father’s promise to take him to the desert had fueled further interest in global longevity patterns. Then came his father’s cancer, which had prompted him to deeper research, and the belief that there had to be a relationship between longevity zones and the number of cancer victims.
